Transfiguring Modern Temporality

Although Zhang Taiyan is famous for being a late Qing nationalist and revolutionary, scholars have yet to explore fully the significance of his Buddhist writings, especially as they relate to time and history. This article closely examines Zhang’s writings about time and history and points out that Zhang made two interrelated but potentially conflicting arguments. On the one hand, he invoked Yogācāra Buddhism and Zhuang Zi to expound a relativistic vision of time and history. From this perspective, each nation has its historical particularity and cannot be judged from an external standard. However, on the other hand, in a context where intellectuals were uncritically adopting a framework of history as progress, Zhang grounded the theory of evolution in a theory of karmic seeds to develop an interpretation of history as a double movement in which the good gets better and the bad gets worse. The article delves into the significance of Zhang’s arguments by highlighting the symmetries between Zhang’s exposition of history and the logic of capitalism. Such structural similarities suggest that Zhang could think about time and history in this way precisely because he inhabited a world mediated by the dynamic of capitalism. His writings on Zhuang Zi and Buddhism should be seen as an example of a resistance to capitalism that is not based on a narrative of progress. In the context of twentieth-century Chinese intellectual history, where narratives of progress and evolution are a dominant chord, Zhang’s counterpunctual critique of evolution is especially inspiring.